IWM Blog

As a second year Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD student at Imperial War Museums and the University of Bristol, I now have extensive experience using the museum’s Research Room and accessing its expansive archive. I am fortunate that my supervisor Sarah Paterson works in the Library, and the staff there are both knowledgeable about the archive’s content and very helpful.

In 2020, IWM initiated Digital Futures, a five year project to digitise 1.8 million films, photographs and sound recordings and improve the storage and slow down the degradation of 6.8 million items by freezing, isolating or refrigerating them. This mass preservation project is digitising some of our most vulnerable media from the Cold War era.

One hundred years ago, in November 1920, thousands of women wrote letters to the government asking to be part of the ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 11 November. They were convinced that the Unknown Warrior being buried there that day was their son. This was just one of the stories our young team unearthed in our quest to find out how the Great War affected women’s mental health. We wanted to find out what has changed for women in the past 100 years and which challenges women still face today.

The Battle of Britain is one of the most important events in the history of Britain. But understanding those who were there, who fought, suffered and endured, allows us not only to understand those events, but connect us directly to those ‘few’ who gave so much not only to the many, but to all future generations.

In 2018 as part of the 1418 NOW programme, Shobana Jeyasingh premiered their project ‘Contagion’ at the Gynamisum Gallery in Berwick-upon-Tweed and then toured across the UK. It explored the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, which killed more people than World War One. The performance explores the speed in which a virus can spread and its destructive nature to the body.

The chance find of an evocative photograph launched me on a quest to trace the lives and deaths of ten men and their family before and after the war. Of these ten Sandhurst officer cadets, three won the Military Cross and one became a general. Incidentally, all my subjects volunteered during the first two weeks of September 1914. However, like thousands of other volunteers, some in this group became casualties before they made any contribution to the war. There were also those who for various reasons sought a way out. Here are some of their stories.